Thanks for sharing those, Roberts. I have installed TC on my eee pc 701 (800x480 resolution only!) and thus will try those tips.

By the way, I like curaga's tiny "watcher" program which I used docked in jwm. I wish there could be an option to make it even smaller by not showing the swap statistics (no swap may be common on netbooks with flash drive)

Is it possible to move the task-bar to the bottom of the screen (which is where I am used to seeing it) and get rid of that MAC-like dashboard altogether.

I started with a 10” Toshibe with a mouse-point, so quickly learnt to use key-strokes instead, therefore, I don t need button-bars, scroll-bars and in some apps, menu-bars, all maximising screen real estate.

On my netbooks, I now use flwm.I compiled to use the shared fltk libs already in TC so it is way smaller than jwm.

No wasted screen space. The menu, pager, and task indicator are always available as a popup, either by right click desktop, or it is is covered by open window(s), then right click on any window title bar.

It really helps on the smaller screens of netbooks and being both physically smaller and runtime smaller is also a plus.

if you're a sadist. actually i think you're making a joke, but at that point you don't need a gui to make a first impression or help new users, just go to microcore and make everything an extension (including aterm and rxvt.)

flwm is a cool window manager if you're feeling adventurous, but i'd rather talk someone through using the command line than through the flwm interface.

now i love a good text-user-interface, especially if it supports the mouse. otherwise you've got the text-only appbrowser with 100 selections and scrolling through them isn't that bad. you can either type out the whole name, use search or just keep scrolling until you get there.

and after all that's only until you've got networking up, installed a gui, and downloaded the graphical appbrowser. from there it's pretty straightforward, no matter what level of hardcore linuxy geekiness you like, just short of lfs i mean.

i thought that was the ethos of tinycorelinux. and i agree with this. let people pick and choose what they (don't) want.

in general it is, and in general i agree. the only place i would differ is that tc is a minimal "desktop" based distro, was from conception. remove the gui and it's a command line distro that allows gui installation. no problem for people that already know and for peope that are already online- they can just type "load desktop" and they're off. but for anyone struggling to get tc to work they just got one less incentive, they now only see a cli giving them trouble, they've never seen how blazing fast tc's gui is so they think maybe don't ever bother instaling the gui on a old machine, really fast lowram installs use cli (ubuntu proves it right?)

they don't have the friendly app installer so they think they'll always have to type the name of the apps they're installing, or download them one at a time. it's not true but less familiar setting breed more misconceptions. they try to get wireless working before they ever see the gui, i'd rather experiment with that in a nice term in a gui (where i can open a nice browser to look up more info in and cut/paste without fiddling with the 2-button simulation of 3-button mice to copy/paste in the cli.)

tinycore had a balance of comfort and style out of the box and i can see it's going to lose that over an obsession with making it more "hardcore." there are actually a lot of people it won't affect (including everyone already familiar with it, who won't be affected much because they know all the tips and tricks) but it will nt just trash first impressions, it will create obstacles for new users that didn't exist before.

that was my stance anyway. as more obstacles are introduced and tc goes from balanced and friendly to slightly more complicated and more eccentric, it won't even matter if there's a gui because we'll have already given up on trying to impress, welcome or entice any users that don't want the hassle of setting up every-single-option befre they can even look up the forums or use the graphical appbrowser in other words, forget it, carry on, let's strip it down to the kernel and hope everyone likes waiting to see some kind of result after booting to the command line until they've set up pppoe, downloaded and setup the gui, instead of just making it easy to remove the gui let's make them work just to see it (that's a reasonable expectation in a modern distro.) it's microcore, and the law of diminishing returns be damned- let's get tedious! getting it from 10mb to 5 will be well worth it.